An overview of an online archive of four centuries of Jewish family history

What this site is

The Porges family website is a privately maintained online archive devoted to the genealogy and history of the Porges families — an extended cluster of Jewish families whose recorded presence in Central Europe stretches from Prague around the year 1600 to communities scattered across the world today. Its tagline, displayed prominently on the homepage, captures the project succinctly: “Four Centuries, Six Languages, One Site.” The site brings together more than sixty distinct family trees and biographies, hundreds of historical documents, photographs, maps, and lists of births, marriages, deaths, deportations, and burials, all linked together as an evolving digital reference.

Rather than a static genealogy in the conventional sense, the site behaves more like a small online encyclopedia organised around a single surname. Material is drawn from sources in German (including Gothic script), French, English, Czech, Croatian and Hebrew, and the curators have not attempted to flatten this multilingualism: many original documents are preserved alongside translations. The four pillars of the site, as the homepage lays them out, are family (biographies and trees), history (empires, factories, ideas), geography (maps and cemeteries), and memorial (Holocaust and Terezín).

How the project began

The site has an unusually charming origin story for a piece of genealogical scholarship. In 1992 — long before Google existed — the founders searched the CompuServe Members Directory for the surname “Porges” and sent a short message to the dozen or so people the search returned. Most replied. Almost all of those Porges families in the United States turned out to trace their roots back to Austria or Czechoslovakia, just as the founders’ own great-grandfather had. What had been assumed to be a rare and obscure name suddenly looked like a network.

Over the next two years the founders, working from Paris, gathered family trees, photographs and personal stories from Porges relatives in the United States, Canada, England, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Australia. They conducted research in major libraries in Prague and New York, including the Leo Baeck Institute (now part of the Center for Jewish History), the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the New York Public Library. The website itself was launched in November 2000, originally as a way of organising material that had become impossible to manage in linear form. It has been updated repeatedly ever since, with the most recent overhaul completed in 2026 by Antoine Porgès in Paris.

The Porges name and its earliest traces

A central thread running through the site is the question of where the Porges name actually comes from. Two competing theories are presented in detail. The popular legend, repeated in many family branches, holds that “Porges” is a Sephardic name derived from “Português” or from the Spanish town Burgos, and that the family descends from Jews expelled from Iberia in 1492 who eventually settled in Central Europe. The site documents this tradition carefully — for example, the Purjesz branch in Hungary preserved a Spanish family crest and Sephardic customs even while living in an Ashkenazi community.

Against this, the site sets the more rigorous philological theory advanced by Alexander Beider, a noted historian of Jewish surnames. In Beider’s reading, Porges is a metronymic surname formed in Prague, derived from the feminine given name Purye — a hypocoristic of the biblical Zipporah. In old German sources the letter “G” was sometimes used in place of “J,” yielding the variants Porjes, Porges, Borges and Borgis, all from the same root. Several lines of circumstantial evidence point to Prague as the genuine point of origin: documented Porges presence in the city from at least the late fifteenth century, the very high concentration of Porges names in the Prague Jewish community well before surnames were imposed by Joseph II in 1787, and the fact that 254 Porges were deported from Prague to Terezín during the Second World War.

The earliest individual the site documents in any depth is Moses ben Israel Naphtaly Hirsch Porges, known as the Prager, born in Prague around 1600 and died in Jerusalem in 1670. A relative of Isaiah ha-Levi Horowitz, he settled in Jerusalem as a scribe and was sent back to Europe as an emissary of the Ashkenazi community after the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49 left it overwhelmed with debt. During this mission he published, in Prague, Frankfurt and Amsterdam in 1650, a small illustrated Judeo-German work titled Darkhei Ziyyon (“Roads to Zion”) — a kind of practical manual for Jewish travellers and immigrants to the Holy Land. The site treats him as the probable common ancestor of many, perhaps most, of the Porges families documented elsewhere on the site.

Where the Porges lived

From this Prague core the family branches outward across Central Europe and ultimately around the globe. The site’s “Where they lived and died” section organises material by country: Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Romania, South Africa, the United States, and Yugoslavia. Vienna in particular emerges as a major hub, with phone books for 1932–1938 reproduced in detail and the IKG cemetery register analysed plot by plot. Bohemia and Moravia — Prague, Brno, Plzeň, Karolinenthal, Pilsen, Klatovy, Příbram, Krnov, Neuern/Nyrsko — supply the bulk of the older trees. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Porges families have moved on to Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Yugoslavia, then to France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Australia and Israel.

To anchor all of this geographically, the site provides a substantial collection of maps: the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Bohemia, Moravia 1882, the Marquisate of Moravia, Prague 1900, Hungary and Transylvania, Slovakia, Germany in 1836 and again in 1994, political Europe in 1996, and a separate map of the Nazi concentration camps. The maps section is paired with detailed cemetery documentation — most extensively the New Jewish Cemetery of Prague, which alone records 138 Porges burials between 1890 and 1975, but also the older Jewish cemeteries of Prague, Vienna’s cemeteries, Plzeň, and the Porgès tombs in Paris’s Père Lachaise.

Notable family members

The biographical index is the heart of the site. It contains more than sixty named branches and individual biographies, ranging from rabbis and scribes of seventeenth-century Prague to twentieth-century writers, artists and politicians. A few figures recur as featured highlights. Jules Porgès (Vienna 1839 – Paris 1921) was a diamond magnate and mining entrepreneur who became one of the founders of modern South African mining and built the Château de Rochefort-en-Yvelines outside Paris; an entire sub-section of the site is devoted to his career, his residences and his social life. Heinrich Porges (1837–1900) was a close musical disciple of Richard Wagner — the composer asked him to attend every Ring rehearsal at Bayreuth and write down his every instruction, producing what would become a foundational document of Wagnerian performance practice. Esther Porges (Prague 1804–1869) is documented as a great-grandmother of Fred Astaire.

Equally important is the Porges von Portheim branch, descended from the brothers Moses (1781–1870) and Juda/Leopold (1784–1869) Porges, who in 1815 bought a former baroque palace in Smichov, Prague, and turned it into both a family residence and one of the largest calico-printing factories in the Habsburg empire — at its peak employing around a thousand workers and operating one of the first steam-powered printing presses in the region. When Emperor Ferdinand V visited the works in 1841, Moses Porges famously asked, in lieu of a personal honour, that the Jews of the empire be granted full civic equality; the request was refused, and the family was instead ennobled with the suffix “von Portheim,” taken from the Portuguese town of Oporto.

The wider gallery of biographies includes Elsa Bernstein (née Porges), the late nineteenth-century playwright who wrote under the pseudonym Ernst Rosmer; Friedrich Porges (1890–1977), a Vienna-born screenwriter and film historian who ended his career in Hollywood; Paul Peter Porges, the New York cartoonist; Maria Porges, an American visual artist; Stephen W. Porges, the American psychophysiologist; Nenad Porges, a Croatian government minister and ambassador; the brothers Arthur and Irwin Porges, an American science-fiction writer and an Edgar Rice Burroughs biographer respectively; the Porgesz and Purjesz lines in Hungary; and Franz Kafka’s maternal grandmother, born Esther Porias, who appears via the closely related Porias variant. The site treats the surname spellings Porges, Porgès, Porgesz, Porjes, Porjesz, Purjes, Purjesz and Porias as belonging to a single extended family.

Memorial and Holocaust documentation

A substantial portion of the site is given over to documenting the destruction of the European Porges families during the Second World War. According to the figures collected here, 254 Porges were deported from Prague, Vienna and Germany to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto, and from there to other camps; the site reproduces both a 254-name list compiled from the records of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic and a 227-name list provided in November 2000 by Beit Theresienstadt at Kibbutz Givat Chayim Ihud. Separate pages document deportations from Paris and from Vienna, the 1941 seizure of Porges-owned works of art in Paris, and other wartime spoliations of Porges property.

Around these lists the site assembles broader context: an overview of the Theresienstadt camp adapted from the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Miroslav Karny’s essay on the genocide of the Czech Jews, Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann’s survivor interview, a review of the children’s drawings collection I Never Saw Another Butterfly, and a map of the concentration camps. The intent throughout is to ground the abstract numbers in specific named individuals: Otto Porges and Elsa Bernstein (née Porges), for example, are noted by name as among the Porges deported to Terezín.

Historical and cultural context

Beyond the family itself, the site reproduces or excerpts a small library of historical writing relevant to Central European Jewry. Featured texts include William O. McCagg Jr.’s history of the Habsburg Jews from 1670 to 1918, Raleigh Trevelyan’s Grand Dukes and Diamonds (which discusses Jules Porgès), Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna (with substantial excerpts on Czechs and Jews in Vienna), a chapter on Hitler’s origins by Alexander Lernet-Holenia, regional histories of Jewish life in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Transylvania and Yugoslavia, a history of Brno from 1848 to 1918, and material on the Frankist movement of the eighteenth century, in which Moses and Leopold Judah Porges were involved. The site also includes a page on the abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman, whose vertical “zip” paintings are credited as the visual inspiration for the site’s graphic design.

Sources, structure and the 2026 update

The site’s evidentiary base is unusually broad for a personal genealogy project. It includes Vienna phone books for 1932–1938, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York and Montgomery (Alabama) city directories, the New York census from 1790 to 1890, the Illinois census, New York naturalisation records, the Social Security Death Index (with 121 Porges entries), Prague conscription books, and the IKG Vienna cemetery register, alongside encyclopedia articles, newspaper clippings and personal correspondence. A bibliography page catalogues works by Porges authors and references to Porges individuals in encyclopedias, with library locations in the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York Public Library, the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine.

The 2026 update, the most recent overhaul, is described as both a technical and a research advance. On the technical side, legacy code has been replaced with a more modern framework and the visual design harmonised across pages. On the research side, the update incorporates contributions from family members, material drawn from the Geni genealogy platform, and — notably — a systematic AI-assisted analysis of 232 Porges-related obituaries published between 1877 and 1938 in the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna and the Prager Tagblatt of Prague, two of Central Europe’s major newspapers of the period. These obituaries have been used to refine and extend dozens of the family trees.

In sum

Taken as a whole, the Porges site is something fairly rare: an amateur genealogical project that has grown into a genuine multilingual reference work on a particular slice of Central European Jewish history. It treats the surname Porges not just as a family-tree exercise but as a lens through which to look at four hundred years of Jewish life in Prague, Vienna and the Habsburg lands — the rabbinic culture of seventeenth-century Bohemia, the industrial and emancipatory currents of the nineteenth century, the cultural flowering of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the diaspora that followed. The site’s tone, throughout, is one of patient accumulation rather than argument: it gathers documents, presents them in context, and invites the reader to draw their own connections.

Porgès
Paris, 2026